From Manjit Kumar at Physics World, reviewing Peter Watson’s Convergence: the Deepest Idea in the Universe, expresses some caution about that: Wherever experimental evidence can be coaxed out of nature, it suffices to corroborate or refute a theory and serves as the sole arbiter of validity. But where evidence is sparse or absent, other criteria, including aesthetic ones, have been allowed to come into play – both in formulating a theory and evaluating it. Watson believes that because of this, in some ways “physics has become mathematics”, arguing that we are currently “living in an in-between time, and have no way of knowing whether many of the ideas current in physics will endure and be supported by experiment”. This, Watson Read More ›

From Mike Wall at LiveScience: Humanity should be wary of seeking out contact with alien civilizations, Stephen Hawking has warned once again. … For what it’s worth, some other astronomers believe Hawking’s caution is unwarranted. Any alien civilization advanced enough to come to Earth would surely already know of humans’ existence via the radio and TV signals that humanity has been sending out into space since 1900 or so, this line of thinking goes. More. Hawking airs his concerns in his new documentary, Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places (paywall) See also: But surely we can’t conjure an entire advanced civilization? and How do we grapple with the idea that ET might not be out there? Follow UD News at Twitter! Trailer:

From Laurel Hamer at Science News: Textbook drawings of the cell’s largest organelle might need to be updated based on new images. Super-resolution shots of the endoplasmic reticulum reveal tightly packed tubes where previous pictures showed plain flat sheets, scientists report in the Oct. 28 Science. The finding helps explain how the endoplasmic reticulum, or ER, reshapes itself in response to changing conditions, says study coauthor Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, a cell biologist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Va. More. And it all just happens, see, via natural selection acting on random mutations, like textbooks have been preaching for fifty years. Yuh. See also: Royal Society meeting on new trend in evolutionary biology is definitely going Read More ›

A: One of the old sayings of WW II era bomber pilots was that flak gets heaviest over a sensitive target. So, when something as intuitively obvious and easily demonstrated as configuration-based, functionally specific complex organisation and/or associated (explicit or implicit) information — FSCO/I — becomes a focus for objections, that is an implicit sign of its central importance and potential impact on the prevailing a priori materialism school of thought. So, it is appropriate to pause, headline and note for record its source in the works of Orgel, Wicken and Thaxton et al (where Dembski’s link to CSI is also important, cf here from a few days ago; as is the metric approach by Trevors, Abel, Durston Chiu et Read More ›

If Darwin’s boys don’t get to town in time, it will be historic. A chance to talk about what really happens in evolution without Darwin clogging the works. New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives Scientific meeting Register for this event Register now Starts: November 072016 09:00 Add to calendar Ends: November 092016 17:00 Add to calendar Location The Royal Society, London, 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AG View map Venue information Overview Scientific discussion meeting organised in partnership with the British Academy by Professor Denis Noble CBE FMedSci FRS, Professor Nancy Cartwright FBA, Professor Sir Patrick Bateson FRS, Professor John Dupré and Professor Kevin Laland. The Royal Society, London Developments in evolutionary biology and adjacent Read More ›

Who thought twenty years ago we’d be reading science releases like this ? From Jeffrey M. Perkel at The Scientist: The idea of establishing an ant colony as a model system for epigenetics dates back nearly 12 years to a conversation Reinberg had with Shelley Berger, an epigeneticist at the University of Pennsylvania. Berger had recently returned from a family vacation in Costa Rica, where she spent time watching leaf-cutter ants in action. Ant colonies are highly homogeneous, genetically speaking. Yet their members vary dramatically in shape, size, and behavior. “In some cases the worker and queen are absolutely identical genetically, and yet they have completely different functions,” Berger explains. “The workers give up their reproduction to the queen.” Such Read More ›

From Hanneke Weitering at Space.com: In the film, six astronauts aboard the space station study a sample collected from Mars that could provide evidence for extraterrestrial life on the Red Planet. The crew determines that the sample contains a large, single-celled organism — the first example of life beyond Earth. … At first, the tiny alien seems cute and harmless as it sits inside a gloved containment box. When one of the astronauts puts his hands into the gloves and reaches in to touch the alien, its small, stringy, mushroom-like figure wiggles as if it’s being tickled. But the cuteness doesn’t last long. More. No, It wouldn’t. Otherwise, there’d be no story. Happily… See also: What we know and don’t Read More ›

Does anyone remember this from our textbook cell biology? From Michael Le Page at New Scientist: Giants, self-sacrifice, biological warfare: this story has them all. A voracious marine predator plagued by a giant virus has a defence system we’ve never seen before – it fights back by making its very own virus. The individuals that make these bioweapons sacrifice themselves for the greater good, saving their fellow predators in the process. The single-celled predator, Cafeteria roenbergensis, is common in coastal waters around the world, where it snacks on bacteria More. Giant viruses have yet to be factored into a serious discussion of living things. Curiously, the Royal Society suppressed discussion of the role of viruses at its upcoming rethinking evolution Read More ›

According to Living Planet. From Nisha Gaind at Nature: The populations of Earth’s wild mammals, birds, amphibians, fish and other vertebrates declined by more than half between 1970 and 2012, according to a report from environmental charity WWF and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). Activities such as deforestation, poaching and human-induced climate change are in large part to blame for the decline. If the trend continues, then by 2020 the world will have lost two-thirds of its vertebrate biodiversity, according to the Living Planet Report 2016. “There is no sign yet that this rate will decrease,” the report says. More. Apart from issues around data bias covered in Gaind’s article, a question remains: When we try to save a Read More ›

Excerpt, from Michael Marshall at BBC: “The strength of Miller-Urey is to show that you can go from a simple atmosphere and produce lots of biological molecules,” says John Sutherland of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. The details turned out to be wrong, since later studies showed that the early Earth’s atmosphere had a different mix of gases. But that is almost beside the point. “It was massively iconic, stimulated the public’s imagination and continues to be cited extensively,” says Sutherland. More. Sure. Once we can dispense with Mike Behe’s question, “how, exactly,” we just need to pick a theory that suits our colleagues and ourselves. Apparently, life was more complicated than anyone had thought. Despite the Read More ›

From Kate Becker at Nautilus: Before arXiv, preprint papers were available only within small scientific circles, distributed by hand and by mail, and the journals in which they were ultimately published months later (if they were published at all) were holed up in university libraries. But arXiv has democratized the playing field, giving scientists instant access to ideas from all kinds of colleagues, all over the world, from prestigious chairs at elite universities to post-docs drudging away at off-brand institutions and scientists in developing countries with meager research support. Paul Ginsparg set up arXiv in 1991, when he was a 35-year-old physicist at Los Alamos. He expected only about 100 papers to go out to a few hundred email subscribers Read More ›

From Rochelle Poole at Science: On the first day of my first field expedition, my adviser abruptly shifted all the field resources to a different topic that didn’t match my experience or career ambitions, ignoring our rigorous research plans—and my growing objections. Such a capricious change was unacceptable, I said, but my adviser countered my resistance. “I have the power to do this,” he said. “This is how science works; you are just naïve.” To some extent he was right: Ph.D. advisers wield the power to create or destroy research careers, and students typically have few—if any—ways to protect themselves from advisers who misuse this responsibility, especially during remote fieldwork. I was upset, but he was the field manager, so Read More ›

From Kendall Powell at Nature: But some data and anecdotal evidence suggest that scientists do face more hurdles in starting research groups now than did many of their senior colleagues 20–30 years ago. Chief among those challenges is the unprecedented number competing for funding pools that have remained stagnant or shrunk in the past decade. “The number of people is at an all-time high, but the number of awards hasn’t changed,” says Jon Lorsch, director of the US National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) in Bethesda, Maryland. “A lot of people with influence on the system recognize this is a serious problem and are trying to fix it.” Young scientists and senior scientists alike feel an acute pressure to Read More ›

From Andrew Griffin at Independent: British scientists don’t like Richard Dawkins, finds study that didn’t even ask questions about Richard Dawkins Though Dawkins wasn’t a part of the interview process, and researchers didn’t ask about him, 48 of the 137 British scientists they spoke to mentioned Dawkins. Of those 48 that referenced him, 80 per cent said they thought that Dawkins misrepresents science and scientists in his books and public speeches, according to the study by Rice University, Texas. Other scientists did stand up for the evolutionary biologist, and the remaining 20 per cent were positive views. One said that Dawkins has “quite an important place in society” because of his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. The study was Read More ›

From Mike Wall at Space.com: For starters, HD 189733b is much bigger and hotter than Earth; it’s about the size of Jupiter and zips around its host star in just 2.2 Earth days. That orbit is so close that the exoplanet is probably tidally locked, always showing one face to its star, just as the moon always shows one face (the near side) to Earth. And then there’s the weather. The winds on HD 189733b (which lies about 63 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Vulpecula) blow at up to 5,400 mph (8,700 km/h) — about seven times the speed of sound. And if that’s not crazy enough for you, scientists think the rain on this world is made not Read More ›